All Hallows' Eve

A walk through Hollywood Cemetery is a journey through Richmond's past. Today I happened upon J.E.B. Stuart's grave (above) and the tomb of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ellen Glasgow. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

Richmond's favorite cemetery wasn't very spooky this afternoon.

Perhaps it was just because it was Halloween, but for whatever reason I decided to take a break and spend a quiet hour or so walking through Hollywood Cemetery. It was a peaceful way to spend part of a sunny afternoon.

In my ramble, I happened upon J.E.B. Stuart's grave with its small Confederate flags and large obelisk. I heard a low voice from the other side of a bush. When I backed up to take a picture of Stuart's grave, I saw the middle-aged bicyclist who had stopped to use his cell phone.

In front of a mausoleum a few yards away, a gray-haired couple sat on a bench in the sun, admiring fresh flowers on a grave. Members of a walking tour murmured in the distance as they followed their guide. A family with two small children spread a blanket beside one of Hollywood's winding roadways. They had a picnic, with a large bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Below, the James River caught the sun.

Hollywood Cemetery wasn't named for the town in Southern California. It predates the movies by a half century. The name came from the holly trees that covered a commanding bluff overlooking the James River.

A little history:

Richmond's cemeteries were filling up. Hollywood was meant to solve two problems: the need for burial space and a yearning for green space. Designed in 1847, the cemetery was not without opposition. Those against it said it would hold back the city's westward expansion. Others feared that runoff from decaying corpses would foul the city's water supply. Neither of those potential consequences has occurred.

A century and a half later, the cemetery celebrates nature. Mature trees and shrubbery are everywhere, and a story that wants to be told seems to materialize at every turn. Paths wind through markers that approach the heights of fine art.

More than 75,000 people are buried at Hollywood, including three presidents (Monroe, Tyler and Davis). Other tombs, no less grand, bear names known now mostly to historians: Douglas Freeman, Lewis Powell, Mary Munford, Virginius Dabney, Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell. Lewis Ginter, the tobacco magnate who is as big in death as he was in life, is buried in Hollywood's largest mausoleum. His tomb has windows made by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Some graves are more recent, and a very few are fresh.

Hollywood Cemetery on this quiet Sunday afternoon was a good place for a walk. This garden of stone is as much a place for the living as for the dead.

NOTE: Those of you who remember Mae, the blind cat I wrote about on Oct. 11, will be happy to hear she has a new home. Tamsen at the SPCA e-mailed me last week with the good news.

The fashion parade

My mom used Simplicity patterns to make clothes for my sister and me when we were kids.

I was never all that interested in clothes. I didn't start to make decisions about what to wear, really, until I started college.

My mom came from a long line of Appalachian women who sewed. I wore homemade shirts until I was about 7 or 8. Her family came from a time and place in Virginia where store-bought was a luxury.

My mom would follow Simplicity patterns and find material where she could: When I was really young, in the 1940s, our neighborhood grocer still sold chicken-feed from a bag in a barrel. He would save the feed bags and sell them to customers. Yes, the feed manufacturers knew that the bags might wind up as clothes, so feed sacks came in plaid, stripes, and other decorative patterns. (And yes, some of our neighbors kept chickens in their back yards. We had a bantam hen and rooster for a time in our yard on Church Hill.)

My grandmother, who taught my mom to sew, put her own skills to work professionally when her kids were older. Granny went to work for Friedman-Marks, hand-stitching and machine-sewing suits for men. You could buy the suits at Rockingham Clothes at 1800 W. Broad St., near the Sears store.

My mom didn't sew jackets or pants for me, so when I was old enough to wear suits, she bought them at Rockingham. My grandmother would make necessary alterations by hand. Nobody asked me what I preferred. I wore what my mom bought, and factors like durability, price and "room to grow" were what counted.

When I was a teenager, my mom went to work at Miller & Rhoads. She took great advantage of the store's sales: She bought all of my clothes there until I was in high school, most often without my even being present. Her thrifty shopping made me look like I was always one step behind and trying to catch up.

I didn't care.

I didn't pay any attention to what I wore in junior high or high school, and many of my friends didn't either. There were girls who wore Villager blouses and guys who wore Gant shirts, but fashion didn't rule.

That changed dramatically when I went to the University of Richmond.

U.R. tradition dictated that we wear a coat and tie to class. I began to insist on some say in what I wore, and I started shopping for myself. It took me a while, but I assembled a wardrobe of blazers, white button-down Oxford shirts, conservative ties, khaki pants, wool crewneck sweaters, and Bass Weejuns loafers. I chose my clothes as student camouflage: I wanted to look like everybody else.

My four years in the Air Force in Germany were lost fashion years. Mostly we wore uniforms, and the only place to buy off-duty clothes was the Base Exchange, where the choices were limited.

When I came back to Richmond, I had to buy new clothes. I relied on the basics -- meaning I updated the U.R. look with contemporary touches because I was working in television. I did take some chances. I bought a red blazer that my dad said made me look like a waiter. (It probably did, but it looked good on TV.) And to add variety to the navy or camel-hair blazers and blue shirts, I began to wear brighter ties to bring some color to the screen. I stuck with that for the next four decades.

Today, after a second career in an art museum, color rules what I wear. To heck with the conservative look. I wore a purple T-shirt to fitness class this morning. My hair is gray now, and I can wear more color than I ever could before. I have knit shirts and dress shirts in every hue of the rainbow including "grape sherbet" and "mango." In the winter, I pair them with equally colorful sweaters.

Late in life, I have discovered that I like color -- and lots of it. It's very liberating. The opinion that counts now is mine. I can indulge myself. Forget durability, price, and "room to grow."

In my closet, however, cleaned and pressed for when a grown-up, dress-up occasion arises, are a blue wool blazer, a white Oxford shirt, gray flannel pants, a blue-and-red repp tie, and a pair of Weejuns. I haven't completely let go of my roots.

Hidden links

Eve Arden

Here’s a history exercise. Some of the names below you’ll know, and some you won’t. They all have something in common. Most of you will easily figure out what links them generally, probably long before you get to the end. But there’s also something more specific you can say about them. It’ll be interesting to see whether you can get that part. (Where possible, each name is a clickable link so that you can check an Internet resource if you’re completely stuck.)

Rosemary Rice
Milton Berle
Frank Gallop
Tallulah Bankhead
Sid Caesar
Kirby Grant
Ted Mack
Jackie Gleason
Bea Benaderet
William Frawley
Dagmar
Harry Von Zell
Dorothy Kilgallen
Eddie Cantor
Imogene Coca
Arthur Godfrey
Gale Gordon
Robert Montgomery
Rex Marshall
Ralph Edwards
Joan Davis
Don DeFore
Spencer Williams
Ben Alexander
Eve Arden
Barbara Britton
Georgiana Carhart

Highlight the following paragraph, and the answer will be revealed.

All of the people listed are ... people I remember seeing on national TV in 1952, the year I turned 10 years old. Commercial television started in 1946, and Richmond’s first TV station, WTVR, signed on in 1948. My family got its first black-and-white set, a Philco floor model, in 1950. Television then was younger than the iPod is now. By the time I was 10, I knew that I wanted to work in this new medium, and these were the people I watched, the people who were pioneering television’s early days. They were the first generation, the ones who helped turn TV into an intimate part of our lives. When the second generation, my generation, started working in the business, the first generation taught us how to do it.

The cat in the Amsterdam window

Click on the image to enlarge it. (Don Dale photo, 2006)

For indoor cats, windows rate right up there with catnip. The experience of surveying the world from a windowsill is endlessly fascinating. The position is high and defensible -- important considerations if you're a cat. And the view is great.

This particular cat, name unknown, was settled in for the duration on a windowsill in the center of Amsterdam on a mild late-spring day in 2006. I was struck by his remarkable good looks, due in no small part to his unusual muted-calico coat. After a long stare establishing his clear superiority, he returned to studying the streetscape, ignoring me as I took a couple of digital images.

There was a lot for him to see and hear from his perch. The street was not a busy one, but there were couples walking, a few holding hands, laughing. Here and there were lone pedestrians, headed home or back to work after running errands, plastic shopping bags in hand.

Two doors down was one of Amsterdam's "coffee shops," the Kadinsky, where the menu doesn't list cappuccinos, mocha frappes and lattes. Usually posted just outside the front door, these coffee-shop menus catalog a wide range of marijuana varieties. The shops sell rolling papers too, but frequent visitors often bring their own pipes. There are a few tables inside where customers can enjoy their purchases, and on a warm day, there might be tables on the sidewalk.

If what you really want in Amsterdam is a cup of coffee, go to a café, not a coffee shop.

Across the street and a few doors down was a nondescript bar in a boxy brick building with a rainbow flag flying above the door. The windows were open but the place was quiet. The establishment would no doubt provide much more visual entertainment after dark for the windowsill cat.

A man in a green jacket caught the cat's eye halfway down the block. He had twirled a rack of souvenir postcards outside a neighborhood market. He took his time thinking about his selections. The cat quickly lost interest.

Two teenagers wearing orange shirts did bicycle tricks in the street near the man picking out postcards. One of them was skilled at executing wheelies, and their laughter underscored the street's soundscape. The cat was ignoring them, as though the boys had been at it for some time and no longer merited his interest.

Noon arrived, and the bells of the Westerkerk punctuated the soundscape from a block away. During World War II, Anne Frank could hear the chimes every quarter hour from her family's attic hiding place nearby. She told her diary that the bells sounded reassuring, especially at night. The cat took no notice of the familiar sound.

The cat yawned and stretched and settled back in to watch a man across the street who was staring into a shop. The sign in the plate glass window said Tibet Winkel/Stitching/Tibet Support Group Nederland. From the outside it looked like a specialty bookstore. Haphazard stacks of reading material were visible through the window.

Next door was an art and interior design boutique. In the front window was a large abstract drawing that seemed to be about man's essential isolation.

And the cat with the pale calico coat watched from his windowsill, still and silent and fascinated, as the day unfolded.

The old bridge over the Arno

Today, shops for tourists line the Ponte Vecchio, the Old Bridge, across the Arno in Florence. (Don Dale photo, 2006)

On a trip to Florence, everybody wants to see Michelangelo's David, Filippo Brunelleschi's dome atop the city's Gothic cathedral, Andrea Pisano and Lorenzo Ghiberti's golden doors of the Baptistery of St. John, and the art treasures of the Uffizi museum.

But another of the city's beloved treasures is the Ponte Vecchio (that's Italian for old bridge), which crosses the Arno river.

The bridge is lined with shops, and if you've got the big bucks, you can buy jewelry, art and expensive souvenirs. Or you can stop in the middle for a free, wide-open view of the city's skyline up- or down-river. The view to the west is spectacularly beautiful at sunset.

Nowhere in Florence is the Southern European sun's famed yellow glow more evident than on the Ponte Vecchio. It's the light that so many Renaissance painters tried to capture, that particular deep and rich yellow radiance that is emblematic of place.

The Ponte Vecchio is usually crowded. Florentines whose business takes them across the Arno use the bridge, but the majority of those strolling its nearly 300-foot length are tourists, many of them North American or Asian. At either approach to the bridge, predictably, you'll find both overpriced cafés and tourist shops. I picked up a tacky plaster cast of David at one of the latter.

We had a late lunch one warm afternoon - coffee and Parma ham on slices of cantaloupe -- at a café on the north bank near the bridge and spent at least 90 minutes doing what I often think I like best about traveling -- people-watching. On the corner opposite the café was a souvenir stand selling "Firenze" banners and buttons, and across from that was an African man with a sidewalk array of messenger bags that he said were made from "good-quality leather." (Anybody in commerce near the Ponte Vecchio knows at least some English.)

The Ponte Vecchio speaks eloquently of antiquity, medieval times, the Renaissance, and today. The piers were made of stone by the Romans. Over the centuries, the bridge itself has been rebuilt -- more strongly and more elaborately each time. It was swept away by a flood in 1117, but it was the only bridge in Florence spared by Hitler during the German retreat in August 1944.

Above the shops on the bridge -- yes, there is a second story -- is a passageway connecting the Florence town hall with the Pitti Palace on the opposite bank. Cosimo I de Medici had it built in 1565 so he wouldn't have to mingle with the common folk on the bridge below.

I wondered why there are a proliferation of padlocks in place on the bridge's railing and on the fence around the bridge's statue of artist Benvenuto Cellini. Somebody told me that the padlocks are a modern oddity. Young couples ceremoniously lock them there to signify their eternal bonds. The city used to have to remove thousands from time to time. Now there's a sign that says there will be a 50-euro fine. But some young couples still do it anyway.

Yes, the Ponte Vecchio is definitely a place to let Florence seep under your skin for a few hours.

Perfection, in Carrara marble

(Don Dale photo, 2006)

You're not allowed to take pictures inside the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence.

I found that out just moments after snapping off a single shot of Michelangelo's David in 2006. It was just a matter of seconds before a security guard told me emphatically that photography was not permitted.

I hadn't set out deliberately to break the rules. I'd missed the signs posted at the entrance -- not surprising, given how crowded the gallery was.

Florence had been on my list of European cities to visit for almost 30 years, but I didn't get there until 2006. That was probably for the best: By then, I had learned enough about art to appreciate the city's treasures, and Michelangelo's David was what I most wanted to see.

The sculpture of the teenage biblical figure, which some say depicts the moment between his decision to take on Goliath and the beginning of their epic battle, is perfection in Carrara marble. Seeing it in person was sublime.

Michelangelo was 25 years old in 1501 when he began carving his David.

The figure, completed in 1504, is 17 feet tall. It was originally placed outdoors at the Piazza della Signoria, adjacent to the Florentine seat of government. It soon came to symbolize the city's love of civil liberty. Growing concerns about the toll taken by exposure to the elements led to its being moved inside the Accademia in 1873. (A replica was placed at the original location in 1910.)

Today, David is one of Italy's most-loved tourist attractions. I am glad we took our guidebook's advice and bought tickets in advance. That cost us about $14 apiece, but it saved us at least two hours of waiting in line. With tickets in hand, we were admitted to the Accademia immediately.

Many replicas of the sculpture have been created over time. I bought a cheap plaster version at a souvenir stand near the Ponte Vecchio.

A reproduction of the statue was presented to Queen Victoria by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1857. She, in turn, gave it to what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The story goes that on her first encounter with the sculpture, Queen Victoria was so shocked by the nudity that a fig leaf was commissioned and kept in readiness for royal visits. On such occasions the fig leaf was hung on the sculpture using two strategically placed hooks.

Cassie update

(Don Dale photo, 2010)

Speaking of cats, which I seem to be doing often here, Cassie is getting along just fine.

After a rhinoscopy and histology exam by a kitty internal-medicine specialist, I learned that the problem that's been making Cassie sneeze so violently and keeping her nose so clogged up is a chronic viral infection, complicated by an opportunistic bacterial infection, that we'll probably have to manage for the rest of her life.

A month's worth of antibiotics cleared up the bacterial infection nicely. Nosedrops once a day seem to be holding down the viral inflammation.

Nosedrops? For a cat? Hmmmm.

Both the vet and I envisioned that an adversarial relationship might result from my administering nosedrops. I thought that Cassie would see this as the kitty equivalent of waterboarding. The vet said chances were that the treatment would cause such a disruption in our relationship that the negative effects would outweigh the positive. "But give it a try," she told me. "She might be one of those cats who tolerate it."

It's been almost two weeks now, and the nosedrops seem to be effective. I hear her sneeze maybe once a day. And -- surprise! -- Cassie tolerates the procedure. I won't say she likes it -- no, indeed -- but she has gotten to the point that my efforts to hold her head steady while I put two drops in the space between her nostrils evoke merely a token resistance. She doesn't fight, although she shakes her head vigorously and licks her nose afterward. Then she is content to be petted and held. A few seconds later, she's purring and curling up next to me.

Amazing. Cassie is a refined and dignified patient.

And with the pollen the way it is right now, I'm sneezing far more than Cassie is.

Meeting Mae

Mae is a very special tuxedo cat I met recently. She is seen here sitting on her favorite lime-green cushion. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

I met a blind cat a few weeks ago. I was immediately charmed by her -- so much so that I've been back to visit her at the SPCA three times now.

Mae is the cat that accompanied Tamsen Kingry and me to the WTVR TV studios for a recent interview on "Virginia this Morning." Tamsen is the SPCA's chief operating officer. We were there to talk about the Seniors for Seniors program, which connects humans 65 and older with pets 5 and older. I adopted my cat, Cassie, through the program in March. (My first thought was to bring Cassie along for the interview, but Tamsen suggested we bring a cat who was adoptable instead of one who already has a home.)

I met Mae and Tamsen before our interview in a waiting area at WTVR. Mae was in her carrier. Lively and affectionate, she poked her curious nose through the grate and rubbed against my fingers as Tamsen told me about her. When she said that Mae is blind, I was astonished. I had never met a blind cat before.

When we moved into the studio for the interview, Tamsen took Mae out of her carrier, and she snuggled comfortably between us on the set, purring and even more affectionate now that she was unconfined. Tamsen explained to the audience that Mae is a special-needs kitty and emphasized that she will need extra attention when she finds a new home. The interview went well. When it was over, we said our good-byes, and I gave Mae a farewell scratch under her chin before Tamsen returned her to her carrier.

About a week later, I visited Mae at the SPCA. She lives in a bright and cheerful room with a handful of other special-needs cats. Her favorite place to curl up is on a lime-green cushion under a blue chair next to the door. When I sat down on the floor and picked her up, she settled readily into my lap and purred enthusiastically. She's a sweet-natured and gentle cat and relishes attention, even from comparative strangers. She knows her way around the room and can easily find her litter box and her food and water. It occurred to me that Mae has never really known what life would be like if she were sighted. Her world is dark, but it's filled with other cats and kind people, and she seems to compensate for her lack of vision with a sharp sense of smell and acute hearing.

I have visited Mae several more times. I think she recognizes me, although that might be wishful thinking on my part. I thought long and hard about adopting her myself, but Cassie's vet and I agreed that it might be too risky, since Cassie is still fighting a persistent, contagious viral infection.

I mentioned my interest in Mae in an e-mail to a friend, Christine, who lives in London. Christine told me that she had a friend here in the States, Norma, whose blind cat had recently died after a long and happy life. I e-mailed Norma with a question that had been gnawing at me. How does a blind cat figure out how to enjoy the pleasure of bounding up onto a windowsill or jumping into a warm lap? And how does she work up the nerve to spring back down? The literal leap of faith involved seemed impossible to me.

Norma's cat, Elizabeth, managed with few problems, she told me.

"She jumped up on her favorite blanket-covered chairs and onto our laps till the end. She loved jumping onto the wide windowsill and loved sleeping on 'her chair' on our screened porch during the warm months. We are convinced she was the most affectionate cat on the planet.

"It's my opinion that Mae will learn to jump on a chair or lap without much trouble. Maybe she would have to be lifted onto permitted areas a few times, but I think she will compensate with more acute hearing and the use of her whiskers in negotiating rooms. Elizabeth didn't run -- she walked carefully and did bump into things sometimes.

"She loved being on people's laps, especially my husband Dean's lap. As soon as he settled into a chair, she was there on his lap, purring loudly, and he still misses her so much."

Mae, who tugs at my heartstrings, is still at the SPCA awaiting just the right person, one who understands her special needs and has time for the extra attention she'll need as she learns to adapt to new surroundings.

I hope she'll soon find that special home.

Plot B, Row 10, Grave 36

(Don Dale photo, 2004)

Who was Cecil Woodrow Winburne, U.S. Army serial number 6882691?

It's a question I gnawed on during our 60th-anniversary study tour of the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe. We visited the battlefields. Then we visited the American military cemeteries, those vast stone gardens of death.

More than 93,000 American dead from World War II are buried in those cemeteries, which stretch from England through Normandy and into the Ardennes.

Today, they are peaceful reminders of sacrifice and courage. Visitors -- and there are always visitors -- move quietly among the graves.

I found Private Cecil Winburne's cross in Plot B, Row 10, Grave 36, in the American cemetery in Luxembourg. He is among 5,075 people buried there. Most were killed in the Battle of the Bulge or the Allied advance to the Rhine.

I photographed Winburne's grave in 2004 because the inscription noted that he was a Virginian. Who was he? You can't tell from the spare words on his marker. When I got home, I decided to do some research.

Private Winburne, I learned, was from Richmond. In the late 1930s he was a clerk at Miller & Rhoads department store. He lived on New Kent Avenue just across the Lee Bridge, with his mother, Minnie, and his father, Ernest. As war loomed, Winburne enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment, took his training in Tennessee, and shipped out to England in August 1944. On December 23, he was flown into France, and on Christmas Day his unit took over a sector of the defense of the Meuse River. Patton then gave orders to seize a small town in Belgium where the Germans had mounted a brutal resistance. Winburne's unit sustained heavy casualties, but it achieved its objective.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed a short article in late January 1945 that said Private Winburne died from wounds received in action. He was 30 years old. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

We toss around the word "hero" too often today. But by the more stringent standards of nearly 70 years ago, Winburne's unit unquestionably had its share of valiant men.

I like what author Thomas Heggen said in 1946 in his book "Mister Roberts." Heggen warns against using the word "hero" to describe all those who died during the war.

But, he says, "they are all equally dead. And you could say this affirmative thing of all: that in a war of terrifying consequences and overwhelming agony, they participated 100 percent. ... They are the chosen."

If Cecil Woodrow Winburne of Richmond did not die in a manner that history will long remember, we can nevertheless echo what Heggen said: Private Winburne was one of the chosen.

From a distance

The class of 1960 took a 50th reunion tour Saturday of the former Hermitage High School. It wasn't until Sunday morning that I realized that, in taking this photograph, I was once again replicating an image from my past. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

A memorable photo of the main hallway -- as empty of people as I'd ever seen it -- filled a full page in my senior yearbook at Hermitage High School.

It's a picture that sticks with me to this day. I dragged out my copy of the yearbook this morning, and it was just as I remembered. Seeing it again crystallized thoughts I had in 1960. The black-and-white picture was a demonstration of artistic perspective -- although I didn't have the words to express it in 1960. It appealed to me as a teenager on some gut level as a way of seeing the future -- or even the past. The distinct lines of the walls, the floor, the ceiling -- shot from slightly to one side of center -- seemed to converge in the distance, to meet at infinity.

The picture evoked so much for me in that summer between high school and college -- the isolation I often felt at that age, the predictable and reassuring form and space of familiar places, the carefree joy and absurd angst I left behind in that hallway, and the unknown and unknowable future.

I later summoned forth that empty-hallway image literally and metaphorically on a few occasions in my work in television. More important, it shows up regularly in my personal photography.

It took me a few years to discover that the graphic perspective demonstrated in that shot was a known quantity long before I noticed it. About 600 years ago, for example, Italian artist Filippo Brunelleschi, who later engineered the magnificent dome atop the Florence cathedral, demonstrated two-dimensional geometric perspective: all lines converge in a distant horizon.

Once again, on this Class of 1960 reunion weekend, the lasting power of that long-ago image was driven home -- in a picture I took without too much thought of a scene that was unfolding 50 years later in the same central hallway of Hermitage High School. It was only when I was reviewing the picture today that I realized what I had done. You can see the results above.

The Hermitage High School from which I graduated isn't Hermitage High anymore. It's now Moody Middle School with a $10 million renovation. But it hasn't changed all that much physically. Moody's principal came in on a crisp and sunny fall day to give us a 50th reunion tour.

The emotional impact of going back for the first time in so many years was remarkable. I recognized few of my classmates. But I found myself overwhelmed by specific memories of time and place -- classrooms where I began to study journalism and the English language, the auditorium where our senior play gave me a taste of public affirmation, the surroundings in which classmates and teachers were a scale for weighing how to handle both praise and criticism, and the place where the simple joy of having no serious responsibilities was tempered by a gnawing realization that those guileless days were finite.

About a third of our class gathered at the Jefferson Lakeside Country Club last night for dinner, reminiscing, and music from the 1950s. (Wisely, one of our classmates had prepared name tags with our yearbook pictures to speed recognition.) I enjoyed catching up and seeing how time has dealt with all of us. (I was also struck by what nice, decent people we have all become in the past five decades.)

But none of the weekend's fun activities had the impact of that tour of the old Hermitage High. I was swept back with an almost physical rush to my high school days, when life seemed to stretch endlessly in front of me, when I was painfully naïve and ceaselessly optimistic, when I was afraid that I might not seize each day and make something special of it, when the future was mine for the taking if I made the right choices. Life was, for just a moment, very young again. And all lines converged on a far distant horizon.